🟧 Taste Notes 3.20.25
Polycule retreats, esoteric outfits, LA martinis
Taste Notes is One Thing’s patented monthly link dump and vibe documentation. For March, the quest for dense American architecture, French-y steakhouses, students abusing AI, and the new Literalism / Romanticism. By Kyle Chayka (KC) and Nate Gallant (NG).
Romanticism, now: Two recent essays, one from novelist and critic Namwali Serpell on the “New Literalism” in film, and the other from the “Honest Broker” newsletter on the putative and proliferate New Romanticism, are very much about the same thing. We get more literal, and ignore the fundamental potential for ambiguity in art, the more we yearn for an immaterial solution to the problems of our world. Both nostalgia and spirituality have a difficult relationship to the forms of material media available to us now, but there are lots of people, as Serpell notes, pushing these boundaries in curious ways. (NG)
Make America Scandinavia: My favorite response to Donald Trump’s absurd hypothetical imperialism in Canada and Greenland, aka trolling for better international economic arrangements, is this campaign to have Denmark buy California: “We’ll bring hygge to Hollywood, bike lanes to Beverly Hills, and organic smørrebrød to every street corner.” Not to mention a strong social safety net and excellent light-roast coffee. Denmarkification of the US seems better than the Americaification of anywhere else. (KC)
Architectural abbondanza
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance is the new must-have tome for the urbanist, online leftist, or think-tank employee in your life. The pair of writers / podcasters call for a liberal vision of more building, more innovation, more experimentation, embracing “the fiery creation of the new.” That involves upzoning and building a lot more housing. The reaction to the book so far seems to be that building housing in itself doesn’t necessarily constitute a political plan. But I like looking out for signs of new American density that already exist. There’s a successful car-free neighborhood in Tempe, AZ, that is now two years old, as documented in this Dwell feature. And there’s Alys Beach, a surreally Santorini-esque development in Florida with tall, white townhouses. More people want to live in cities these days; thus, we need more, and more typologies of, cities. IMO this comes down to indisputable consumerism: There’s a demand for a type of real estate, so it should be supplied. Density doesn’t have to be Manhattan-style scary. The Netherlands gets it, just look at this plan for a car-free district in the middle of Utrecht. And yet somehow we’re still not embracing the plan of repopulating medieval walled Italian cities…
I would like to know what the architecture of the utopian liberal future looks like. Klein and Thompson could do worse than hiring Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture to imagine something, though it might not be to everyone’s taste. OMA just released its plans for the expansion of the New Museum on the Bowery in NYC, replacing a crumbling warehouse with a faceted white monolith. The most interesting aspect might be the grand staircase within the street-facing facade. I’m recalling OMA’s 2001 concept for expanding the Whitney’s Breuer building, with a looming polygon that floated above the original museum like the Death Star — much cooler. But then how radical are art museums lately, anyway.
Props to Hanya Yanagihara, who seems to draw on an endless well of “carefully restored modernist marvels on the Japanese coast” to fill her magazine each month. I really wonder about the threat of cultural overexposure here. At what point do we get totally sick of sensitively rehabbed mid-century relics adopted like rescue puppies by bored rich people and their uninspired descendants? Apartamento magazine used to document actually accessible bohemian spaces, but it, too, eventually ran out of relatability. Interiors coverage has always been elitist; now it’s getting absurdist in an era when even home ownership feels inaccessible. True editorial realism would be a Wirecutter guide to making IKEA shelves look like built-ins. (KC)
Hot hat takes: I can’t take any credit, but am curious what those who read our “Musk as Fascist Soccer Coach” piece from before he took his post as troller-in-chief might make of this NYT analysis of his self-styling. His aesthetic has certainly remained consistent. (NG)
Esoteric fits?: Not unrelated to Catholic aesthetics is this piece from Ssense’s growing department of narrative content on a trend of, in their words, “esotericism” in fashion, arguably distinguishable from hipsterism, which meant to signal a contrariness, rather than hiding a true meaning known only to the insiders. But can esoteric fashion help me hide from the crushing sense of trend and identity-signalling? (NG)
Chasing clout: Producers are now pushing directors to cast their films based on how many total Instagram followers the actors have, according to Maya Hawke in an interview. Catching up with book publishing, music production, and… every other creative industry now more driven by social media than artistic impact. (KC)
Hot Italian summer: The new film from the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, Parthenope, seems very Sorrentino. Both ruminative and excessive, a unique combination in an era of increasingly banal claims to “New Maximalisms.” (In more US theaters presumably soon.) Stay tuned for more Sorrentino in our future coverage of the ongoing Pope-aissance in culture. (NG)
The restaurant biz
The 2000s-era foodie is “dead,” according to the respected food critic turned newsletterer Robert Sietsema, because consumption has become more performative and less about any integral part of the cooking itself: “modern social media often strips food of its cultural context.”
The LA Times’s restaurant critic Bill Addison wrote a lovely ode to the martini, orbiting around LA’s Musso & Frank Grill a, classic provider of the cocktail: ”Like a pizza, the martini dies a quick death. The first sip is everything, and then the temperature rises. And the proportions, measured by human hands, will be different every time, however microscopically. Its existence hinges on variability.”
Daniel Boulud’s La Tête d’Or steakhouse is the new hot NYC restaurant, with largely positive reviews in The New Yorker and New York Mag. What that means is that money and meat are still very much in fashion. Frenchiness is dominating everythingggg probably because it’s a familiar and reliable format for concomitant booming inequality and ~economic uncertainty~
Reservation deposits and minimum spends are becoming more common, according to the FT, as restaurants combat bots and influencers who take photos but don’t eat enough. Does the same apply for Ozempic users? (KC)
Coffee shops are going pastel: The matchaification of American cafe culture continues apace as the drink has gone viral on TikTok again. I’m convinced it’s 95% because of the lambent light-green hue. All the new Starbucks Reserve drinks this season are made of matcha and ube and cherry blossom, “exotic” international ingredients that happen to have compelling, unusual colors. Is this the final, fatal flaw of coffee as a commodity, that no matter how good it is it’s still just kind of brown? Strawberry cold cream is more identifiable as a public marker of consumption than a good crema. (Remember, this is part of Starbucks’s reboot campaign under the new CEO, which OT covered previously.) (KC)
For rent: Run a cult / ketamine therapy clinic / polycule retreat from this combo conversation pit / bed pit, purple-carpeted apartment in Livingston Manor in the Catskills, $1,700 / month.
Under the Tuscan sun: A rustic stone-arched farmhouse with 4 bedrooms, 12 kilometers from the coast in Suvereto. Beach and farm vibes together! €680,000.
The dictionary defines AI as…: As with our “brodernism” piece, it’s not often that a screenshot of a poem makes the rounds on social media outside of whatever is left of Poetry Twitter (where Danez Smith and Ilya Kaminsky were my favorite follows during the one week I was online a few years ago). This poem by Joseph Fasano hit a chord, though. If you talk to anyone who grades papers nowadays, they will likely tell you that every day spent with student’s typed Word documents is a sort of never ending, banal, yet paranoia-inducing Turing test. Is the writing too good, so that means it’s AI? Is the writing too bad, so that means it’s AI? What kinds of mistakes or bad ideas are students’, simulacra of students from scraped AI-training data, or the anxious virtual para-consciousness of a metaphorical neural network crying out to stop making it read technical manuals? (NG)
Aperçu: Let’s end with Nathen Heller reviewing the legendary Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s new memoir in The New Yorker, a description that should apply to any editorial product or possibly creative act (KC):
The defining experience of good magazine reading is “I didn’t think I was interested, but”: the medium is made not in its choice of subjects but in its qualities of execution. Magic happens when at least one person—a writer, a photographer, or an editor—has been allowed to fall in love.
really love your stuff -- any people you would recommend that have the same pulse on culture and taste, and the same level as breadth but coming from the male perspective?
Now we wait for Eric Kim to make the raspberry nutella gochujang miso brioche on Instagram.